Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recounted the horrors of Saturday’s terror attack by the Palestinian terror group Hamas in an address Wednesday evening to his nation introducing his emergency national unity government.
As Breitbart News reported earlier Wednesday, Netanyahu and opposition leader Benny Gantz of the Blue and White Party agreed to form an emergency government of national unity, setting aside political differences until the end of the war. Other opposition parties may follow.
As he introduced the new government, a visibly anguished Netanyahu said:
We saw the wild animals, we saw the barbarians we have to deal with. We are fighting a fierce enemy, an enemy worse than ISIS. We saw boys and girls, bound, shot in the head. Men and women who were burned while still alive, young girls who were raped and slaughtered, soldiers with their heads cut off.
In one place, they forced people to enter a place, and put spare tires around them so that there would be fuel, and they burned them alive.
What a great horror. How great the pain.
…
We all know families whose loved ones were murdered, were kidnapped, were burned. But however great the horror, that is how great our heroism. Men and women, fathers and Mothers, warriors and citizens who have discovered supreme courage and bravery. We are all fighting together, we all fought, and we all will fight for our home.
The horrific practice of burning people with tires was known as “necklacing” in South Africa, and was practiced by the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s as a way of punishing suspected informers and political rivals. Tires, usually filled with fuel, were placed around victims’ necks, and the tires were then set alight, ensuring a slow, painful, and horrific death.
Netanyahu added that every member of Hamas should be considered “a dead man.”
Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant also spoke, vowing to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.”
“What happened has not happened to the Jewish people since 1945,” he added. “There’s no situation in which you kill Israeli kids and we go about our business.”
Those remarks came as the Israeli Air Force (IAF) hit Gaza on what was called an “unprecedented” scale.
Gantz, a former defense minister himself, added: “There’s a time for peace and a time for war, now is the time for war.”
He praised the many Israelis who were returning from around the world to rejoin their units and fight for their country.
He warned: “The reward of our enemies will be blood, fire and pillars of smoke” — a quote from the Book of Joel (3:3) that is also reference, in Jewish tradition, to the Ten Plagues of the Bible that preceded the liberation of the Israelites from slavery.
Breitbart News also reports:
The Palestinian Hamas terror group known as Hamas has called on Muslims worldwide to stage a “Day of Jihad,” or holy war, on Friday, October 13th — coincidentally, a date that resonates with horror movies and the upcoming Halloween holiday.
Hamas referred to the day as “Al-Aqsa Flood” Friday, referring to the name of the operation in which it murdered more than 1,200 Israelis, wounded roughly 3,000, and kidnapped over 100.
Earlier Wednesday, President Joe Biden warned Iran against further involvement with in Israel’s war against Hamas.
“We’ve ‘made it clear to the Iranians, Be careful,” Biden said as he was flanked by Jewish leaders at the White House.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.